Posted
by
samzenpus
on Monday November 14, 2011 @12:52PM
from the slow-down-cowboy dept.

Stirling Newberry writes "New York Times has a report on web-surfing speed tests that their reporter ran using Glasnost, a tool that mimics the bittorrent protocol and measures the results. BT in the UK was among the worst. From the article: 'In the United States, throttling was detected in 23 percent of tests on telecom and cable-television broadband networks, less than the global average of 32 percent. The U.S. operators with higher levels of detected throttling included Insight Communications, a cable-television operator in New York, Kentucky, Indiana and Ohio, where throttling was detected in 38 percent of tests; and Clearwire Communications, where throttling was detected in 35 percent of the tests.'"

Addendum: my above post may be misconstrued as undue hatred or malice towards BP. Rest assured, I would just as readily strangle any executive who works for British Telecom as well. Thanks and apologies if there was any confusion.

I have BP Internet. They don't throttle which is nice, but when something breaks, a torrent of bits sprays everywhere. And it takes their support forever to fix it, and then they just walk away, leaving you to deal with the giant mess.

If traffic is too much on servers, not throttling them would degrade other services as well.I'd hate it if I wanted to check up on, say, Slashdot, but the page was loading at 56k speeds because half the country was watching / torrenting the latest episode of whatever show, as an example.

Throttling is a necessary evil until the ISPs, which are also evil (well, the corrupt ones), get off their ass and actually use our monies to upgrade the lines at a reasonable speed and not slow just because they a

Lately, Comcast has been depositing nearly 100% of the checks that I have sent to them. If they continue to cash my checks at this rate, I will be force to throttle back the check writing to 50% of the invoice amount. During times of peak demand of my money, it is only fair to other utility providers who also require a portion of this limited resource. With throttling in place, which should only affect the top 1% of my creditors, everyone can continue to enjoy "unlimited" payments.

On a side note, this report is shit. paraphrasing... Bell Canada throttles 65% of the time... actually they throttle 100% of the time from 4pm to 2am weekdays and during another set time period on weekends. Rogers throttles 100% of the time period (they're facing some consequences for their 'accidental' game throttling)

And 4-5% false positives is a huge error rate and doesn't account for what level the throttling is taking place on (your ISP could be fine and an intermediary is not)

or at&t or Verizon or Mediacom or Time Warner or Bell or Rogers or Telus.

Comcast is actually probably almost the least-worst in regards to infrastructure. They look to be the only ones getting their asses in gear with regards to IPv6, though it's fairly trivial for them as DOCSS 3.0 requires IPv6 support.

Any article that starts off with the problems of a web page not loading, then goes on to explain that it's because ISPs are throttling a different, completely unrelated protocol is either very confused or intentionally deceptive. It's the NYT, so "confused" is a fair bet.

If they throttle you so your bandwidth does not exceed the agreed upon bandwidth speeds then it should be no big deal. If they shape you below your agreed upon speeds because "it is busy time on their network" it is theft.

Linux distros distribute over BitTorrent, along with some legal movie services, and some game updates. If I'm not mistaken, WoW distributes their large patches with BT.

It is probably fair to say the majority of BT traffic is used for piracy, but not all is. And either way, a common carrier is supposed to treat all traffic as equal. Admitting to policing the data on their network is actually bad, because it then opens them up to liability for anything illegal they don't police.

I'm not surprised at all that ISPs are throttling internet speeds. If a cable company throttles netflix and youtube data then that increases the probability that people will get frustrated and just watch cable tv (especially the advertisements). If Verizon deprioritizes VOIP traffic to reduce call quality then that increases the probability people just go back to using P.O.T.S [wikipedia.org] (which they conveniently sell). Maybe my tin foil hat is a little to tight today, but I think the only real way to prevent this kind of stuff form happening is a decentralized internet.

That might work in a big city where multiple options exist, but rural customers don't have that luxury. Often there is only one option available, or very few; usually the cable company and the phone company - neither of which will be reasonable on price unless you bundle with their other services (that you often don't need/want).

So basically, the options for "stop being their customers" include:

1. Don't use the internet at home. That just isn't feasible for most, or they wouldn't be shopping for an ISP in the first place.

2. Move. Again, just not feasible for most, especially considering the state of the housing market and the fact that most people who live in rural areas don't want to live in a city.

Not to mention the fact boycotting a cable/telephone monopoly isn't going to hurt their business in the least bit. And this isn't exclusive to the countryside - suburban areas are also often limited by monopolies on telecommunication services.

So as a complaint against throttling you're going to go to a *satellite* connection where the default speed is slower than throttled broadband and if you exceed a miniscule amount of data traffic (using on the order of 5gb per month) they'll throttle you to dial-up speeds?

Satellite simply isn't a real option. The model of marketplace competition is sorely broken in the broadband industry today. It's mostly just a bunch of localized monopolies.

Satellite has terrible latency that's about 50% due to the laws of physics, and 50% due to the horrible way Hughes implemented the physical layer protocol (ie, Hughes' equipment takes already-bad latency due to the 50,000-mile round trip and adds another 500-1500+ ms of latency on top).

The ideal protocol for rural broadband would be IDSL + satellite in parallel. Send everything both ways through both routes, and simply ignore (and terminate, if it would matter) the one that would finish second. So, you'd do

I'm an Insight Communications subscriber in central Kentucky. I noticed a month or so ago that during a period of higher-than-average internet usage, my connection speed was being slowed. I pay for 20Mbits. At the worst, with a wired connection I was only getting around 1.5Mbits. This was after moving ~10GB in ten days or so. Hardly excessive usage by most standards.

I'm also an Insight Comms customer in Louisville. I was going to come on in defense of them. But as I think about it, with their recently being acquired by a bigger provider and I having noticed suspect reduction of quality on line (for my 10Mib/s subscription)... I'll have to look into this a little more. However, what other choice do I have? Bellsouth/AT&T? DSL maxes at 6Mib/s and most people don't even get that.

I am a former employee of Insight and here is their dirty little secret. When customers complained about speed issues for example they went to XYZ.com and their speed was slow, we directed them to the only "official speedtest site" which was on the Insight Broadband homepage. What customers didn't know was it never left the system they lived in. For example if you are a customer in Lexington the test went to the Lexington headend and back, so the speedtest levels were almost always at or above the "advertised" speed. So it never went out where the system might be congested or throttled by the company.

That's stupid. If you're only going to accept the results of your chosen "official speed test site", why bother making it even do a stacked test? Why not just have the site spit back entirely artificial results each time?

Telcos like to cry about heavy users, but at the same time they brag about the capabilities of their service. Just don't try to use the service as they've advertised it.

Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile all advertise that you can watch streaming video over their data networks, but then cap data and cry foul because people want to stream video. AT&T ran an ad campaign about the original iPad launch and how you could watch video over their network on the iPad, and then two weeks after the iPad launch they ended unlimited data because they didn't realize people would stream video over the network.

ISPs brag how fast their network is, and talk about downloading large files, streaming video and playing games. But God forbid you want to do any of those things with the service you're paying for.

These companies are subsidized by my tax dollars to build infrastructure. They charge more for less service than their counterparts around the globe. They advertise a service and then complain when people buy and want to use the service.

And while people would scream foul if Google got into the ISP business (despite allowing a Comcast/NBC/Universal merger) frankly I would welcome some competition.

Sometimes, firing up a bittorrent client and downloading something will rapidly cause my internet to slow to a crawl... I'm talking pings of 2500+ to google.com.

However, capping the upload speed to something ridiculously low (10-30 k/sec) seems to fix the problem.

It makes me wonder if the upstream pipe is just saturated with all the connections made in the P2P network.

Furthermore, it doesn't always happen. Sometimes it does just fine with higher upload speeds, so it must have something to do with time of day and/or network conditions.

Well, if you had bothered to google how bit torrent works, or proper settings, you'd find that they suggest capping your upload speed to half your upload speed.

For example, i have DSL, with like a crappy 70k upstream. I run my bittorrent at 35k UPstream cap. And as long as I'm not getting greedy and trying to download a bunch of shit at once, my connection if fine.

If i'm playing EQ2, i cap my download at 350k, and i can play eq2, download stuff with utorrrent, no problem.

But my download speed is generally 200-500 k/sec (during off-peak times can reach 1 m/sec), and capping the upload speed only seems to help once it's been set to some ridiculously low speed, much less than half of the download speed.

Cable tends to be 1/5 of the download bandwidth allocated for upload. Check your bandwidth with a speed test and then multiply the upload result by 0.90, then cap it to that. The extra 10% wiggle room is for DNS lookups and other traffic. Just be sure to check for the bits/bytes problem between different tools.

But my download speed is generally 200-500 k/sec (during off-peak times can reach 1 m/sec), and capping the upload speed only seems to help once it's been set to some ridiculously low speed, much less than half of the download speed.

Admittedly, the original quote could have been worded better, but it wasn't that hard to understand. You do realize that your max upload speed is very small compared to your max download speed on most consumer ISPs, right?

As has been pointed out here, none of the power companies, telcos, and ISPs could provide 100% of all customer's maximum usage at the same time. Throttling isn't in and of itself bad. The issue is if an ISP throttles, say, my Netflix download not because of congestion, but because Netflix competes with their services.

If the broadband operators throttle during heavy traffic times to manage their network, that's one thing. But if they throttle BitTorrent while their 'partner' web sites or streaming video services are still running full speed, I'd be concerned. Very concerned. The former is just a means of keeping a rickety network from collapsing. Yeah, its false advertising if they promised you certain up/download speeds (but only at odd times when no one else is on line). But if its a means of driving business to their preferred services (or crippling all the others that won't kick back part of their revenue), its time for the antitrust people to step in.

Anyone know of a test suite that looks at simultaneous BitTorrent/commercial site download speeds?

For those in the UK who suffer from throttled connections, there are some alternatives. I am a very happy customer of Be (part of the Telefonica group) who provide an uncapped unthrottled service with a static IP for less than £20/month. I get 18Mb/s down. On the same line with BT I got 12Mb/s, capped and throttled for the same price.

This [ispreview.co.uk] is a good resource if you've not found it already.

When you pay for a service that not only is advertised to be what it says, but also shows you on your monthly bill, the payment for that service, are you not obliged to fork up that service, and if you downgrade it, are you not subject to legal action, and being this is a nation wide problem, should the government not step in (as they do when they hear about price fixing) and set them straight with fines that are so massive, not only could the government get out of debt quicker, but once or twice would be e

Once these ISPs learn that we're entitled to everything we want, they'll finally have to stop throttling us. Then we can continue to consume content without paying the people who spent their lives creating it.

Um... how is mimicking the BitTorrent protocol taking money away from people? It's not. You, just like the people who pay you, are so scared of losing control you will go to any means to suppress a technology instead of innovating and coming up with new business models that make it easy for people to c

While I agree with your other post about people feeling entitled to content that they didn't pay for, I think you're going a little overboard here. To use a car analogy, it's like renting a car that is supposed to have a 150 hp engine (that's horsepower, not health/hit points) and then being told if you actually get up to 150 at any time your engine will automatically throttle back down to 50 hp. Yes, it's not your car, you're just paying for the privilege of using it, and the people who you got it from hav

To use a car analogy, it's like renting a car that is supposed to have a 150 hp engine (that's horsepower, not health/hit points) and then being told if you actually get up to 150 at any time your engine will automatically throttle back down to 50 hp.

Your car's engine doesn't actually produce 150 hp most of the time. Not even near 50 hp most of the time. To drive at 70 mph constant speed on a straight road in a resonably efficient car only uses maybe 15 hp. Even when accellerating you don't get anywhere near the 150 hp until the rpm of the engine is excessively high.

More like, you rent the same car the rental company rented out to 6 other people. You're supposed to get it 24/7 according to the rental agreement, but it's way overbooked. So, you only get to use it a fraction of the time you paid for.

ISPs consistently oversell their bandwidth. It's more profitable than actually upgrading their capacity.

I'd like to offer my ISP 70% of their bill one month and then when they come after me, complain about how they're the "entitled" one like it's a bad thing.

I believe your line of thought requires some realignment. If I'm pay for a service, and I get a lesser service, then I am not getting that service. If I am paying for the lesser service, then fucking say so. Don't set my expectations and then fail to deliver.

You are an entitlement nag. You know the service you have. You might not have realized it when you got it, because you didn't PAY ATTENTION.

Oh, I know what I have. I am not happy about it, but I have no choice, because there IS no choice. That does not mean I, contrary to your apparent belief, need to be happy about it. In your mind, my options are apparently "shut up and be grateful like the good little pleb I am that I get service, period", and "live as an anachronism".

You want some government body to step in and make rules and laws so YOU don't have to READ stuff BEFORE YOU SIGN IT. You know very well now what your service is.

Yeah, laws and regulations that would force, well, companies to not lie in their advertising. I know, crazy, right?

And what principle would that be, exactly? By your own admission you don't even pay for the service, which gives you no say at all. In addition, your roommate apparently signed up without a contract establishing any terms of service at all - that makes him an idiot, and you even more so for thinking that you are entitled to complain.

No where that I am aware of did he actually agree to terms and conditions stating that his service would be throttled under X conditions, nor t

And what principle would that be, exactly? By your own admission you don't even pay for the service, which gives you no say at all. In addition, your roommate apparently signed up without a contract establishing any terms of service at all - that makes him an idiot, and you even more so for thinking that you are entitled to complain.

I pay him back for part of the service, though my name is not on the actual bill. Were my name to be on the bill, would it make my complaint any more legitimate? You sound like you would so eagerly white knight for ISPs that it wouldn't matter much if Charter sent jackbooted thugs to beat me in the street. Tell you what, instead of being insulting and snide, deriding me for having the sheer audacity to complain about a service so graciously provided to me, point me to an ISP in the St. Louis area who can

I've got no problem with them throttling, but throttling and then calling your plan unlimited is False advertising, and should be outlawed. Perhaps we need some new language to describe what they are actually doing, but Unlimited is not it.

No it's only a contract if it's between large corporations. Anything paid for that benefits an individual (provided they make less than 7 figures - you know, the 'value producing' class) is an 'entitlement', and it's only right and legal that those so-called 'contracts' go unfulfilled. Only corporations and the upper class are worthy of 'entitlement'. And false advertisement? piffle. That's just the guaranteed right to free speech that the founders MEANT to grant to corporate entities.

Do you have a service level agreement stating guaranteed speeds, latencies, etc? If not, it is highly unlikely that you paid for anywhere near what you think you did. A real T1 line (1.5Mb/s) from AT&T costs $430/month. A T3 line (47MB/s) can cost up to $13000/month. The only way most people can afford internet service at all is by sharing the cost with a whole bunch of other people. Sharing the cost also means you are sharing the resource with them. Sorry, but your $50/month does not entitle you

The only way most people can afford internet service at all is by sharing the cost with a whole bunch of other people. Sharing the cost also means you are sharing the resource with them. Sorry, but your $50/month does not entitle you to any specific performance.

I understand that, and don't expect to literally get the "up to" speed 24/7/365.24.

I do, however, expect to "fairly" compete with other users for the available bandwidth. That way, when everyone gets to enjoy sub-dialup speeds right after dinne

And perhaps the content creators will realize that they are not special little snowflakes and not every idea that comes out of their heads is genius. Maybe if they start charging reasonable prices for their wares and if the governments of the world pare back copyright to a reasonable level, people will actually have respect for them again.

And perhaps the content creators will realize that they are not special little snowflakes and not every idea that comes out of their heads is genius. Maybe if they start charging reasonable prices for their wares and if the governments of the world pare back copyright to a reasonable level, people will actually have respect for them again.

This claim comes up a lot on Slashdot, but I disagree. The cat is out of the bag, young people are already used to getting films and music for free. The industry could lo

I've always considered the last 80 years or so to be a bit of a golden age for the content creators. Technology has caught up to culture in that we can now share it effectively over any distance. It is possible to monetize is, perhaps not at the level that they're used to but still at a profit. Look at what iTunes and Netflix have done. Netflix put a pretty serious damper on casual piracy because it was easy and cheap. If the **AA want to continue hamstringing new innovators they will eventually see th

If you want to talk about entitlement, you have to include the creator class. Nobody has a feeling of something for nothing more than they. Most see copyright as a lottery ticket, or as a reason to work hard for one album and live off of that for the rest of their unproductive lives. They steal from the public domain (Disney, etc.) and never give back. And people like you act surprised when the common person has zero respect for copyright anymore. I'm 30, my grandchildren will doubtfully see the Beatles

I'm pretty sure there has never in my life been a content creator who forced my to consume his wares and pay a fee. Pretty sure that at worst they're offering content for a fee, which I can take or leave if the price is right. I don't think I'm any the poorer if I ignore them.

Conent distributors, OTOH, do all that annoying MAFIAA shit, but they'll be dead in a generation.

Once these ISPs learn that we're entitled to everything we want, they'll finally have to stop throttling us. Then we can continue to consume content without paying the people who spent their lives creating it.

I agree. The entitlement of the unwashed masses doesn't override my entitlement to send my grandchildren to college for a job I did once.

Once these ISPs learn that we're entitled to everything we want, they'll finally have to stop throttling us. Then we can continue to consume content without paying the people who spent their lives creating it.

You aren't entitled to everything you want, but you are entitled to everything you have already paid for. There is a big difference.

For people living in Comcast territory and outside the service area of FTTH, or for people living in Comcast territory who have give up a land line in favor of a cell phone with an unmetered voice plan, what's the alternative to Comcast other than dial-up?

Problem is that locally at least they have horribly inconsistent download speeds and that some throttling is probably necessary. I don't know what their user agreements are like. I don't have a problem with throttling in principle as long as the provider is very clear about the circumstances that will trigger it. There needs to be truth in labeling.

Somehow I doubt that. The point is that people pay for that bandwidth. If your provider fails to provide what people pay for — then he is to blame. Not people using what they bought from him.Imagine if phone companies handled calls the same way they handle data: first you would pay for "unlimited 24/7 connection" and then you would discover, that you as well as sever hundred clients are all connected to one line. Should you start complaining that your calls are more important then those, of all the others or just make the provider do his job and provide the advertised service?

What if electricity providers had to guarantee that every house in the country could consume the maximum current draw their connections are rated for at any given moment? I think the industry is young enough that everyone's still figuring out the right model under which to sell and provide service.

ISPs could move to that model too. But they don't want to. They prefer to charge flat rates and then throttle people who use it more.

They tried to do that in Canada and everybody went apeshit crazy. The federal government got involved and there were protests in the street (really) and ultimately the isps were ordered to abandon it. To be fair the the ISPs wanted to charge a monthly fee with a low cap plus something stupid like $2.50/GB for overages.

The difference is that the electricity companies never CLAIMED to be able to give every household max current draw at any given moment (AFAIK). When I signed up for Comcast I was told "You can have 16 down, 6 up." Whenever I get close to the bandwidth that I was told I could have I get throttled down. Yes, there was the fine print in the contract saying "you can't actually have these speeds 'cause our network can't handle it", but doesn't that imply false advertising?

If they advertised that, then they should absolutely be able to provide it.

I'm not wanting the max speed my equipment is capable of - hell everything in my home LAN past the cable modem is capable of Gigabit per second speeds. What I do want though, is that if the ISP offers me some advertised rate - say 6MBps, then they ought to be able to handle me using up to that amount of bandwidth at any given time.

And truthfully, I don't even think overselling their network would be such a problem if they were more

What if electricity providers had to guarantee that every house in the country could consume the maximum current draw their connections are rated for at any given moment?

Then they had better lower the rated maximum current draw per house! The issue is that the ISP have a very good estimate of how much bandwidth is needed and what the usage bell curve looks like, and intentionally offer services they know they cannot provide.

The problem is the TelCo's advertise a speed and don't deliver. I would understand if the throttling if it were temporary, sure no problem. But if they have failed to solve the issue 5 years running, that is just nonsense. The issue of some users slowin

I pay to be connected to the ISP's on an unlimited supply, a claim they make on every fucking advert and website they have (as does every competitor) - yet they tell me that I have to share and it's only as 'unlimited' as they can manage....

Seriously?Can you post one single advertisement where they claim you have unlimited data?Please only post those where you have taken the time to read the fine print you overlooked the first time.

Really? Perhaps you've never heard of the United States? We've had rolling blackouts over here several times. In fact, it looks like many places in the world have had rolling blackouts. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_blackout#Texas [wikipedia.org]...

the phone company has never had the ability to service 100% of their customer base at the same time. it's been proven for decades every time something happens you get an all circuits are busy message if too many people try to call

the advertised bandwidth is not full internet bandwidth but up to your CO. BT you still have their internet gateway while netflix and other big companies use CDN's to stage their data inside the ISP's network so there will always be preference for some data

Yes, but there's a difference between emergency unexpected situations, and standard operating procedure.

The phone system might get overloaded in a disaster and everyone understands that, but I sure as hell would be pissed if, to make a phone call normally, I had to wait in queue for two minutes until a line opened up.

Phone companies: We can only serve 10% of the capacity we claim to provide at once, and about 2% is normally in use, so everything works except for emergencies.'

ISPs: 'We can only serve 10% of the capacity we claim to provide at once, and about 25% is in use normally, so we've decided to stop actually supplying the service we've sold to people we think are over-using it, and in fact we've built automated systems to do this.'

Everyone understands things fall apart in disasters, or even in expected fringe times. There's a reason, back when pizza places did '30 minutes or it's free' stuff, they always exempted holidays and sporting events. But we're not talking about any sort of unique event. ISPs are throttling all the time, they have are, quite simply, completely overselling their capacity. At all times.

Hell, no one would really care if throttling showed up at, oh, eight in the evening because everyone was on Hulu. Or the net connection was a little slow over Thanksgiving. People would bitch, but we'd understand.

But there's a difference between 'can be slow at peak times' and 'throttled all the time because we don't even have enough capability for normal usage'.

If ISPs don't want to buy more capacity, all they would have to do is stop claiming to provide stuff they don't. Which probably will require actual laws, because some ISPs being honest will result in the lying ISPs gettting the customers.

> If your provider fails to provide what people pay for &mdash; then he is to blame.If your provider isn't providing what they are contracted to provide you do have a legitimate cause for complaint. But almost always in the cases where people complain they are in fact getting what they paid for - the ISP never promised you dedicated bandwidth and no traffic shaping on your residential connection and you haven't paid the going rate for that kind of connection.

I have a web server hosted in location X. My ISP is company Y. I transport data to people hitting the site all using different ISPs. That data is carried by several different companies. They are very much covered under the definition of common carriers.

Telephone companies were considered common carriers. ISPs have fought back against being branded common carriers, but they aren't any different in principle to phone companies. The FCC hasn't gone out of their way to rule definitively on the matter, only vaguely determining that telecommunication companies can be considered common carriers.

The net neutrality debate could be made considerably simpler if the FCC would outright call all American ISPs common carriers.

The Supreme Court in NCTA v. Brand X [wikipedia.org] ruled that cable ISPs are "information services" rather than "telecommunications services", and thus are not subject to the taxes and regulations of the latter, which includes common carrier status. The next month, the FCC reclassified DSL ISPs as the same (link [fcc.gov] (PDF)), which also removed the requirement that incumbent carriers lease lines to independent ISPs, effectively obliterating competition.

And what laws might those be? If anything, we need federal laws to force municipalities and deed-restricted communities to allow competition, instead of allowing them to sign away the rights of their residents in near-perpetuity. The fact is, housing is about as non-elastic of a market as you can get, and it's hard to guarantee your own rights to competitive broadband in perpetuity EVEN IF you do your homework and make it a point to che